Avi the Ambu­lance and the Snowy Day

The third in this charm­ing series—Avi the Ambu­lance Goes To School and Avi the Ambu­lance To the Res­cue are the first two — con­tin­ues with the same suc­cess­ful char­ac­ters. Avi’s ambu­lance fam­i­ly, who live in a garage in Jerusalem, humor­ous­ly and lov­ing­ly per­son­i­fy human char­ac­ter­is­tics. Pro­fes­sion­al­ly their job is to save lives; at home, the fam­i­ly has fun togeth­er and share lov­ing rela­tion­ships. Dur­ing a rare snow in Jerusalem, Avi and his sis­ter Maya, have a huge snow­ball fight, and soon oth­ers from their group join in, includ­ing Hila the heli­copter and their cowork­ers Zack and Leah. For­tu­nate­ly they have cleared the snow and ice in front of their garage home before they receive a call noti­fy­ing them of a high­way acci­dent on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Avi and his medic, Zack, get caught in the snow storm, too, and need assis­tance from Maya and her medic, Leah, who bring chains to help them get to the pile­up. In just a few min­utes the injured pas­sen­gers are safe­ly brought to the hos­pi­tal, where they receive imme­di­ate assis­tance. The charm­ing sto­ry is fol­lowed by a descrip­tive page telling of the true work of the Magen David Adom, Israel’s ambu­lance, blood ser­vices, and dis­as­ter relief orga­ni­za­tion. A clear and beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed lay­out of all the parts of an ambu­lance also fol­lows, in addi­tion to a full page of vocab­u­lary explain­ing med­ical terms in Eng­lish and some relat­ed Hebrew words.

Illus­tra­tions are filled with humor and whim­sy, and the gray­ish tones fit per­fect­ly with the win­try themes. The book is edu­ca­tion­al­ly use­ful in the class­room for units on Israel, win­ter, Jerusalem, help­ing, trans­porta­tion, and vehi­cles and is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed for preschool, ages 3 to 6.

Shelly Feit has an M.L.S. and a Sixth-year Spe­cial­ist’s Cer­tifi­cate in infor­ma­tion sci­ence. She is the library direc­tor and media spe­cial­ist at the Mori­ah School in Engle­wood, NJ.